Details here.

Sensory Science appears to be a holding company for a bunch of other things. The interesting ones to us are Go-Video (those dual VHS and VHS/DVD decks), Rave:MP (which will no-doubt be killed/folded into the Rio product line), and California Audio Labs (makes super-high-end audiophile equipment).

ReplayTV, for those of you who don't know, makes a hard-disk based TV recorder, much like TiVo. It runs FreeBSD, I believe.

The million dollar question is what kinds of interesting products can come out this merger. A Go-Video + ReplayTV box with EMPEG software would be the ultimate home multimedia station. Rip your CDs, store them on the hard drive as MP3s, plus save your videos and write them back out to tape later, or maybe rip the sound from a video or do video editing, or ... It could be a hell of a toy. Want to mix Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on top of The Wizard of Oz? It's just a small matter of software.

Of course, this gizmo would also be the ultimate copyright violation station, meaning it'll never happen.

Another random fantasy:

California Audio Labs (the high-end audio unit) could build an AudioRequest-like gizmo (integrated ripping and playing), running EMPEG software, and (naturally) costing a mint. Of course, no self-respecting tube-amp audiophile would want MP3 compression (anybody claiming they can hear the difference between different brands of speaker wire would be horrified by lossy compression). Nope, just drop in a couple 80GB hard disks and rip straight to WAV files.

But, at the end of the day, the ultimate issue is whether SonicBlue management can truly integrate all these companies. The EMPEG merger made lots of sense. They were already working together and the companies complement each other nicely. These new mergers are less obviously good.